In psycholinguistics there is a strong trend to study universal aspects of language and language processing. Since psychological processes involved in comprehending non-IndoEuropean languages have not been investigated, English-speaking psychologists have assumed that those processes identified in English-speaking people are universal. Much of my research focusing on this issue has raised the possibility of at least two basic processing differences between English and Japanese monolinguals. First, English monolinguals tend to process a sentence in a sequential manner, while Japanese monolinguals process in a gestalt-like manner. Second, the negative is processed analytically by English monolinguals while it is processed holistically by Japanese monolinguals. The proposed research explores these possibilities by using the statement verification and question answering paradigm. Specifically, the research attempts (1) to show different ways of statement verification and question answering among English and Japanese monolinguals; (2) to propose a new cross-linguistic processing model to account for these differences; and (3) to provide a broader basis for the study of statement verification.